Search results for ""Author Bill Ferster""
Johns Hopkins University Press Teaching Machines: Learning from the Intersection of Education and Technology
The allure of educational technology is easy to understand. Classroom instruction is an expensive and time-consuming process fraught with contradictory theories and frustratingly uneven results. Educators, inspired by machines' contributions to modern life, have been using technology to facilitate teaching for centuries. In Teaching Machines, Bill Ferster examines past attempts to automate instruction from the earliest use of the postal service for distance education to the current maelstrom surrounding Massive Open Online Courses. He tells the stories of the entrepreneurs and visionaries who, beginning in the colonial era, developed and promoted various instructional technologies. Ferster touches on a wide range of attempts to enhance the classroom experience with machines, from hornbooks, the Chautauqua movement, and correspondence courses to B. F. Skinner's teaching machine, intelligent tutoring systems, and eLearning. The famed progressive teachers, researchers, and administrators that the book highlights often overcame substantial hurdles to implement their ideas, but not all of them succeeded in improving the quality of education. Teaching Machines provides invaluable new insight into our current debate over the efficacy of educational technology.
£35.44
Johns Hopkins University Press Sage on the Screen: Education, Media, and How We Learn
Since the days of Thomas Edison, technology has held the promise of lowering the cost of education. The fantasy of leveraging a fixed production cost to reach an unlimited number of consumers is an enticing economic proposition, one that has been repeatedly attempted with each new media format, from radio and television to MOOCs, where star academics make online video lectures available to millions of students at little cost. In Sage on the Screen, Bill Ferster explores the historical, theoretical, and practical perspectives of using broadcast media to teach by examining a century of efforts to use it at home and in the classroom. Along the way, he shares stories from teachers, administrators, entrepreneurs, and innovators who promoted the use of cutting-edge technology-while critically evaluating their motives for doing so. Taking a close look at the origins of various media forms, their interrelatedness, and their impact on education thus far, Ferster asks why broadcast media has been so much more successful at entertaining people than it has been at educating them. Accessibly written and full of explanatory art, Sage on the Screen offers fresh insight into the current and future uses of instructional technology, from K-12 through non-institutionally-based learning.
£30.50
